Just today, I found that there is another company that allows people to invest in Scotch whiskey as well as wines. The company is Vinovest and, as far as I can tell, it is an American company that was founded in 2020. As its name suggests, the company appears to have been initially started as a way to invest in bottles of wine. At present, it also has a way for people to invest in bottles of whiskey (branded whiskey such as Macallan, Johnnie Walker, etc.) as well as casks of whiskey. WhiskyInvestDirect only invests in casks of whiskey. I should add that Vinovest's whiskey investments are not limited to Scotch whiskey. American and Japanese whiskeys are also available for investment.
At the moment, I do not intend to invest with Vinovest and only bring this up as it is related to WhiskyInvestDirect. If I do decide to invest with Vinovest, I will state so here before I open an account and buy anything. That said, I do not anticipate that I will ever open an account with Vinovest.
Being that Vinovest allows investing in bottled wine and whiskey, it is a means by which a person so inclined to invest (speculate) in bottled alcoholic products can do so. As I have mentioned in previous postsings, rather spectacular gains can be made in buying and selling bottled whiskies and wines. I don't understand wines but I think I remember reading that wine in a bottle continues to improve with age so long as it is stored properly. However, that is not the case with whiskey. My personal opinion of buying bottled wine or whiskey is that it is highly speculative, especially for older stock (product bottles years ago and traded on the secondary market).
The existence of Vinovest, I suspect, could slightly reduce the returns seen at WhiskyInvestDirect. In previous postings, I have mentioned that there is more money than whiskey as it has been nigh impossible to purchase somewhat larger quantities of newly-casked whiskey since 2022. In addition to the surfeit of money now on the WhiskyInvestDirect platform, it now has a competitor in Vinovest for distillery stock. That is, if a large distillery such as Diageo wants to offload some casks of whiskey for repurchase later, it now has at least two major purchasers for those casks: WhiskyInvestDirect and Vinovest. This is likely to result in the distilleries being able to ask for a higher price for casks of whiskey.
Likewise, when the distilleries wish to buy back casks of whiskey for bottling, they may be able to offer a lower price assuming that more than one platform has casks of the whiskey desired by the distilleries.
Vinovest could be a business run by people who genuinely love wines and whiskies. However, I get the depressing, uncomfortable feeling that it's a company borne out of decades of failed Federal Reserve monetary policies and is just another venue to rent-seek or speculate (Airbnb, Uber, cryptocurrencies, etc.).
Meb Faber interviewed one of the founders of Vinovest and the YouTube video of the interview is below.
From Vinovest's web site:
Fine wine has delivered 10.6% annualized returns for more than two decades, outperforming global equities. Meanwhile, Knight Frank called whiskey "the best-performing collectable of the decade."
I can only assume Knight Frank is referring to bottled whiskey. Ugh. On a final note, I cannot wait for the current everything bubble to pop. Only after the serial bubble blowing ends can we get true price discovery in things and wipe out all the zombie companies and braindead concept companies.
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